10 Reasons to Organize Your Brand Assets

Your product is excellent, your customers come back for more, and your website is lovely. This is the real deal, and you mean business. But is your company organized from the inside-out?

If you’ve been working so hard getting great products and services out there that organizing your brand assets has fallen to the wayside, you are among the ranks of those who don’t yet have it all together – which is to say, all of us.

Here are 10 Reasons to Organize Your Brand Assets:

10. The company’s official color – HEX #66FF99 – is cropping up all over the spectrum in odd hues that just aren’t YOU. Because that number and a visual reference of the color was buried deep within an outdated slide deck in a folder no one knows about, the perfect hybrid of cyan and yellow has morphed into various greens in presentations and even distributed marketing collateral. Your vendors might not even notice it, but you notice it. An off-brand color scheme or font will still feel “off” to your customers, even if they can’t quite put a finger on what’s different. Accessibility to your company fonts and colors matters.

9. Those “Where do I find …” e-mails take up valuable time. Everyone with ownership of branded assets has been inundated with these requests. They may be easy to respond to, but make no mistake: they are distracting you from productive work. Consider, too, the time it takes your collaborators to dig through files and folders to no avail, and the delays caused while they await response.

8. Your asset-passing emails are hard to keep up with. Make it easy by supplying not ten, not five, but a single link to your branded assets. No more lost or out-versioned email attachments. Organize your brand assets with only the latest and greatest versions in a single place – stop attachment hunting and folder searching.

7. What if your branded assets were well-documented, filterable, and measurable? Usage data isn’t just useful for analyzing external audiences. Knowing what assets are utilized and how within your marketing organization can offer extremely valuable insight into your marketing operations. Big data is here to stay, so stay on top of it.

5. Finalized brand assets should come hand-in-hand with their usage guidelines. Chances are, yours don’t. Have a beautiful brand book, but the files live in a “shoe box” called a flash drive? Yep, we’ve seen that before.

4. You’ve got gaps, but you might not know it. Can you examine your brand assets to see what’s missing? In one place? Without opening a single file? Without wanting to cry? A fully complete brand guide will have what you need to share with any member of your internal marketing team, sales, distribution, retail, or press. But you don’t always know where all of that lives, so organize your brand assets in a place those people can easily find them and save yourself, and them, a lot of time.

3. Formalizing your brand should involve some formalities. Don’t let someone else determine how your brand assets live. Present them beautifully and simply, and let them stand out against your competitors. Ever Google Image search your logo or a headshot of your CEO? Try it and see where your brand assets are right now. Then, organize your brand assets on Brandfolder and you’ll know where they are (shameless plug).

2. The press won’t wait on your assets. If you can’t respond right away to a press request for brand imagery or other assets, there’s a good chance your company will end up being featured with a cheesy stock photo, or something pixelated, unofficial, and just off-brand. Or you’ll miss out on the opportunity to be a feature story, and you don’t want that do you?

The number one reason you should organize your brand assets? …

1. You deserve it. And that deserves repeating: You, your team and your partners shouldn’t be losing hair over lost or non-compliant assets. Make available a clean, organized structure for your compliant brand assets, and everyone will breathe easier without even thinking about it. Remember the link we included above about wasting time – when you haven’t spent the time to organize your brand assets, you waste a lot of time looking for them. Stress, hair-falling-out, nail-biting and general crankiness can result. Organize your brand assets, you and your co-workers will thank you.

Paul Arterburn is a Co-founder and the Head of Product at Brandfolder, a Techstars Boulder 2013 company. In this capacity, Paul is responsible for overall product vision and execution. This includes managing the development and design processes, constructing and executing the product roadmap, and deploying code daily. Paul is nearing the magic 10,000 hour mark of coding through the dedication of learning 15 different coding languages over the past 15 years. Daring and scrappy, Paul is ready to leave the Web better than he found it: this is what drove him to found Brandfolder.
Me in 3:
• Movies people can’t believe I don’t like: Star Trek and Star Wars.
• My secret talent: As a songwriter my first songs at age 16 were about all girls, and my latest about just one - my fiancé.
• My first invention: A wrestling move dubbed 'The Bob Dole' still used across the state of Nebraska today.